BOOKSHELF; Real Estate Debacle As Window Into Past

By SAM ROBERTS

Published: April 10, 2011

WHEN life hands you lemons, the old saw goes, make lemonade. Katharine Greider has gone the saying one better, providing refreshment and nourishment without any sour aftertaste. After she and her family were suddenly forced to abandon their apartment in Alphabet City a decade ago, she transformed her personal real estate debacle into an adventure in urban anthropology. The result: ''The Archaeology of Home: An Epic Set on a Thousand Square Feet of the Lower East Side''(PublicAffairs, $26.99).

Her story begins with a phone call from the architect whom she, her husband and their fellow co-op owners had commissioned to repair their dilapidated East Seventh Street row house. He called to explain why the walls were cracking and the basement floor was sinking: The house was on the verge of collapsing. He would wait until after the weekend to report the precarious condition to the Buildings Department, but his advice to the residents was unequivocal: Get out. They did.

Who was to blame? Countless acts and omissions had contributed, she concluded, relieved to learn that ''many, many others had attached themselves to this very place and been torn loose, after a year or after 50 years, by choice or circumstance, but without exception, and forever. The answers to that question -- what happened here? -- kept coming and coming until it seemed to me that to understand this one place might be the closest I would ever come to understanding the universe.''

Beginning her research at the New York Public Library and the Municipal Archives, Ms. Greider found an official entry from 1875 about an addition to the building. ''The present rear wall to be taken out entirely, being in a very unsafe condition,'' it read, prompting her to laugh out loud. ''So the building had indeed been a wreck, not five years ago but 125 years ago,'' Ms. Greider writes.

Her winning narrative (born as an essay in the City section of The New York Times) echoes the metamorphosis of a neighborhood teeming with immigrant history, as she traces the building back to some of its earlier occupants and the block itself to the time of the Lenape Indians.

She spots the marsh on which the house was built and an adjacent stream on an 1859 map by Egbert L. Viele, a civil engineer who warned: ''I know that it is generally supposed that when the city is entirely built upon, all that water will disappear, but such is not the case.''

In the end, safely ensconced in a different apartment a mile downtown, she concludes: ''You can breathe your way home again. And you can take the old places with you.''

Say it ain't so. Another DiMaggio biography. Yet Jerome Charyn applies his considerable skills as a novelist to exploring the gnawing mysteries surrounding a man who ''was brutal in his devotion to the game.''

''Why did his intensity and terrifying heat in center field diminish away from the field and leave him with so little sense of purpose?'' Mr. Charyn asks in ''Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil'' (Yale University Press, $24). ''Why was there such a haunting dissonance between the man and his image, or did we impose an image upon him that was utterly removed from the man?''

Despite the Jolter's inarticulateness off the field, Mr. Charyn does not lack for material. ''Until that heel hobbled him, his play was like a string of perfect sentences,'' he writes. ''And I realized that DiMaggio, who could barely pronounce his name in public, was a novelist's dream.''

PHOTO: CRACKED WALLS: A precarious row house, second from left. (PHOTOGRAPH BY NEW YORK CITY MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES)